McArthur Binion: DNA

An intimate minimalism: McArthur Binion’s permutational uses of abstraction, collage and autobiography

Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion (born 1946) combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. He paints minimalist grids and patterns over copies of his personal documents and photographs, including pages from his handwritten address book and his birth certificate, as well as images of his childhood home and photographs of his hands. This book explores Binion’s DNA series and includes reproductions of more than 80 of his paintings and works on paper, as well as essays investigating this series through the lens of art history, labor, music and writing.

Offering in-depth formal analysis and contextualizing his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion: DNA provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist's larger practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.